SUSE

Cloud, big data and Internet of Things are all contributing to a data explosion in the enterprise – and traditional storage systems are simply unable to manage the load while providing acceptable performance levels.

Software-defined storage (SDS), where enterprise storage hardware and software are decoupled, is the logical next step in the move to a software-defined data centre.

Today, SUSE, the oldest Linux business still running, is a long, long way from its humble beginnings. Then, the first SUSE Linux was a German port of Patrick Volkerding's Slackware, the world's longest surviving Linux distribution.

Pandora’s box of fonts is one of the many ailments of the distro world. As long as we do not have standards, and some rather strict ones at that, we will continue to suffer from bad fonts, bad contrast, bad ergonomics, and in general, settings that are not designed for sustained, prolonged use. It’s a shame, because humans actually use computers to interface with information, to READ text and interpret knowledge using the power of language. It’s the most critical element of the whole thing.

OpenSUSE under-delivers on two fonts – anti-aliasing and hinting options that are less than ideal, and then it lacks the necessary font libraries to make a relevant, modern and pleasing desktop for general use. All of this can be easily solved if there’s more attention, love and passion for the end product. After all, don’t you want people to be spending a lot of time interacting, using and enjoying the distro?

Hopefully, one day, all this will be ancient history. We will be able to choose any which system and never worry or wonder how our experience is going to be impacted by the choice of drivers, monitors, software frameworks, or even where we live. For the time being, if you intend on using openSUSE, this little guide should help you achieve a better, smoother, higher-quality rendering of fonts on the screen, allowing you to enjoy the truly neat Plasma desktop to the fullest. Oh, in the openSUSE review, I promised we would handle this, and handle it we did! Take care.

openSUSE Project's Dominique Leuenberger is back with a new weekly report to inform OpenSuSE Tumbleweed users about the fact that a total of four snapshots have been published this week despite infrastructure's issues still not being fully addressed.

"I’m mainly astonished that there were still 3 (4) snapshots completed, considering the issues the infrastructure had during the last days (openQA had a corrupted disk/database, then download.opensuse.org disappeared on us)," said Dominique Leuenberger in his report.

If you're wondering why you haven't received any snapshots lately for your openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system, you should know that the openSUSE Linux devs had a hard time last week fixing various things and integrate the DNF package manager.

openSUSE Project's Dominique Leuenberger recently informed the Tumbleweed community that the main reason behind the single snapshot released last week for the GNU/Linux distribution was that the DNF integration created metadata in the repository that was only valid for Tumbleweed systems, not Leap.

If you want to use the latest openSUSE Leap 42.3 open-source computer operating system on the cloud, you should know that the openSUSE Project released a set of cloud images for various of the most popular cloud services on the market.

openSUSE Leap 42.3 launched for 64-bit and 32-bit platforms at the end of July 2017, based on the commercial SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 operating system, and it's currently the latest stable release of the popular RPM-based Linux OS. It ships with the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel and up-to-date packages.

So what do we have here? Well, in the end, I have a working system, with 95% of all my original issues and woes fixed. It took me a single day to do all this. Which means the devs and the QA can do so much more. OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 in its default form is not usable. It has terrible hardware support - all the basics are screwed, wonky package management with conflicts and issues, codec problems, bad customization, performance issues, battery issues, filesystem misbehaving, etc. Completely unusable in this form really.

I managed to overcome all these, because I had a free day and I wanted to see what I can do. But then, my version of SUSE has little with the original. A new kernel, different looks, tons of extra software, lots of configuration changes and fixes. Except the name, it's not really a Leap, now is it. Just a Linux with Plasma and such. Thus, my sad summary is that while my games with openSUSE 42.3 were fun, the core product is not suitable for day to day use. You're better off with Kubuntu or even Fedora. Or anything. The amount of problems here was among the biggest in years. Very sad, because SUSE will always have that special place in my heart. Grade 3/10. With my changes 9/10. And lights.

The Germany-based SUSE Linux marked a milestone over the last few days: on Friday, 2 September, the company turned 25, a remarkable achievement in an industry where the remains of software companies litter the landscape around the world.

With the Power Use, RAM + Boot Times With Unity, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, Budgie and KDE Plasma tests this week, many expressed frustration over the heavy KDE packaging on Ubuntu leading to the inflated results for the Plasma 5 desktop tests. For some additional reference, here is how KDE Plasma (and GNOME Shell) compare when running on Ubuntu 17.04 vs. openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Watching this video from SUSE, you might be excused for thinking you’re watching a trailer for a new Netflix original which looks suspiciously like “Game of Thrones.” To paraphrase an old Dodge commercial: “You can tell they’re bad guys because they all wear Red Hats.”

More in Tux Machines

With only two days left until the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system hits the Final Beta milestone, developers are still working on adding finishing touches to this release, and they've again improved the Ubuntu Dock.

NethServer's Alessio Fattorini just informed us today about the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming NethServer 7.4 Linux server-oriented operating system, which is based on CentOS 7.4 and comes with various improvements.

Firefox takes a Quantum leap forward with new developer edition

Earlier this year we wrote about Project Quantum, Mozilla's work to modernize Firefox and rebuild it to handle the needs of the modern Web.
Today, that work takes a big step toward the mainstream with the release of the new Firefox 57 developer edition. The old Firefox developer edition was based on the alpha-quality Aurora channel, which was two versions ahead of the stable version. In April, Mozilla scrapped the Aurora channel, and the developer edition moved to being based on the beta channel. The developer edition is used by a few hundred thousand users each month and is for the most part identical to the beta, except it has a different theme by default—a dark theme instead of the normal light one—and changes a few default settings in ways that developers tend to prefer.